A very interesting presentation from Game Developer Conference 2013 – “Enhancing Hawken and PlanetSide 2 Through Turbulence and Destruction” by Dane Johnston (NVIDIA), Aron Zoellner (NVIDIA), Tramell Isaac (SOE) and Ryan Elam (SOE) – is now finally available for replay from GDC Vault.

The presentation covers the basic features and authoring pipeline of APEX Turbulence and APEX Destruction modules, among other modules, and also provides a little post-mortem on how those modules were utilized to enhance several latest GPU PhysX games – PlanetSide 2 and Hawken.

It was also revealed during the talk, that with current implementation of GPU physics effects in Planetside 2 developers have only “scratched the surface of what APEX can do”, as more advanced content, including enhanced Turbulence effects, Destructible environments (like player created bases) and potentially Environmental cloth will be coming to the game in the future. Good news for PlanetSide 2 players.

During Hawken and APEX Destruction part, it was mentioned that upcoming improvements for the Destruction module will include networking sync support, damage based vertex coloring, more authoring tools options (PhysX plug-ins, third party) and also a new damage system, that is based on artist feedback.